Born in Ferrara, Frescobaldi spent time at the nearby court of the Gonzaga in Mantua in 1615, just a few years after Monteverdi had left for Venice. The two books of arie musicali, published in Florence in 1630, contain music composed in the previous 15 years which adapts the paired pieces familiar from Frescobaldi’s keyboard music (the genre which made his reputation) for a vocal idiom. Le Banquet Celeste follow the strategy of a number of other recordings of the arie (including the critically acclaimed account by Rinaldo Alessandrini – Naïve) by selecting works from both books while also inserting a small number of contrasting instrumental works, which are here given slick and elegant performances.

The general stylistic orientation of the arie is difficult to both categorise and perform persuasively. In the hands of Damien Guillon and his ensemble it is the settings for two and three voices that come off best; there is a good sense of ensemble, added ornamentation is discreet and the wide emotional range of this well-chosen selection effectively delineated. Elsewhere the elusive character of the recitative pieces is not always convincingly revealed, partly because the fundamental and carefully fused relationship between words and music does not come through quite so clearly. Yet despite some weaknesses in Italianate pronunciation, which leads to a lessening of dramatic tension, there are some fine tracks which dispel the myth, beloved of 19th-century historians, that the ‘father of Italian keyboard music’ couldn’t write for the voice.